What a lazy weekend. We had a cloudy, drizzly weekend for a change the past few days. And I took full advantage: playing video games, wrestling with the dogs, and just doing some good quality all-around puttering. It also would’ve been a great time to knock out a few more projects around the house, but I just wasn’t feeling that. I did get out to play a little flag football on Saturday morning though and was surprised to find frost on the ground when Mary and I wandered over to the park at 8:30 in the morning. Winter’s on the prowl.

If you have never watched Friday Night Lights (the TV show on NBC, not the movie), please, please, please do your self a favor and check this show out. I (like just about everyone else) missed out on all of the live runs of the show, but have been catching up with all of season one (available on DVD as of about a month ago). Even if you don’t care a lick for football, I guarantee you’ll find something to love about this show. The acting is superb and the show itself really is more about the striving of the human spirit then the action on the field (though that too is very well done even if a bit overly dramatic at times). And if you do love football or even understand the world of sports in general, all the better. So go rent or Netflix Season One or better yet go buy it for $20 on Amazon. Episode one is probably the weakest episode of the season (though not bad) so give it at least a couple episodes for the full effect. Season 2 premieres on October 5. Don’t let this show die! I’m a big Lost fan, but until that returns to the air, this is the best TV drama out there. Oh, and Explosions in the Sky on the soundtrack, so what’s not to love?

When I was a kid I never understood how anyone could say that Autumn was their favorite time of year. Without hesitation, I’d argue for the virtues of summer and all of its barefoot glory. These days I get it though and if you ask me, I’ll tell you how much I love the moderate days and cool evenings, watching leaves change color and flutter from the trees, and filling my weekends with football and yard work that doesn’t leave me drenched in sweat.

So far this Fall I’ve found two different potential pickup football games to participate in. I played with a group of guys for a couple hours on Wednesday in the park across the street. And this morning Mary and I played with a church group that we bumped into a week ago, also playing in the same park. Later Mary made a huge batch of cabbage rolls (I don’t like cabbage, but after simmering with beef for four hours these things are ridiculously good) which is kind of one of her family’s Fall traditions and we ate these while watching the University of Michigan look like a halfway decent football team in beating Penn State.

Mary and I also teamed up to roll a gigantic boulder in our backyard to a new location this afternoon. We had about a dozen of these rocks scattered throughout our yard in what must have been an enthusiastic “natural” landscaping scheme years ago. I’ve slowly been digging these couple-hundred pound behemoths out and rolling them to the other side of our fence. This last boulder wouldn’t fit through our gate though and I was destroying my back going at it solo. So it now has a new home in the corner of our yard.

I’ve got a wife who plays football, cooks great food, watches football on TV, then slaps on a pair of work gloves to shove a rock around. Awesome.

Usually email forwards are completely asinine. Every once in a while though I laugh out loud:

Three finalists for “Man of the Year”

So, basically all that we’ve learned is that Notre Dame has an atrocious football team this year. I’ll take it though. And a 38-0 drubbing makes next week’s Penn State game a little more compelling. And on a pseudo-related note, I love living on the west coast during college football season. We’ve got games on at 9:00 in the morning! Watching football over breakfast, how great is that? March Madness basketball should be fun too.

I’m in the process of revamping the photos page on this site. A little slow-going, but I do have a start on the last three years of photos up right now. Given how cheap hosted server space is these days, I’m moving all the image files in-house. Organized by year. I know it’s a bit sluggish loading all the thumbnails on each yearly page, but it keeps it simpler on my end and most people have broadband these days anyway. If you happen to bump into any bugs (missing images, weird display issues) send ’em my way.